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Today is Day 15 of the Thirty Days of Love. Today’s Daily Action is to reflect on your story, maybe through a haiku, 140 characters on Twitter, or a six word story. Then, share on social media, with friends over coffee, or in your own journal. However, you do it: write it down! Click here for resources, family actions, and more! Click here to sign up for the daily Thirty Days of Love emails.

“There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.” – Maya Angelou

Growing up in a small town in Georgia, I didn’t know any LGBTQ people. I didn’t see queer people in my school or my church, and the stories I did hear were whispered through layers of shame, silenced by the pressures of my small southern town.

The story I was told, again and again, had a boy meets girl plot and usually a happy ending. I spent years attempting to replicate these fairy tales in my own life, but the endings were never so happy. Instead of finding my Prince Charming, I only hurt myself and others trying to live a story that was not my own.

When we are silenced by oppressions, our truths remain untold.

In a world that pits gays against Christians, we never hear stories of people who embrace Christian faith and LGBTQ identities. As a southern queer femme with a strong Baptist faith, I’m proud to be living a different story, a happy but messier story. I discovered my queer identity in seminary, less than a month after I reclaimed my faith, and I’ve spent almost four year journeying into a queer Christian identity I can truly call my own.

My story is one of the many narratives that interrupts the false dichotomy of gays vs. Christians. Each day, I’m honored to share testimonies of LGBTQ Christians and allies across the country through my work at Believe Out Loud.

Stories create possibilities. Yes, you can be gay and Christian. Yes, you can be a pastor who comes out. Yes, you can be an accepting, loving, and affirming Texan father.

Our stories open doors, and our stories are the way we share hope and possibility with the world.

Today is Day 14 of the Thirty Days of Love. Today’s action is to learn more about how other faith traditions use story to connect. You can start with our partners at Middle Church in New York City. Listen to one of their sermons online. Share with others if you find a story that resonates with you! Click here for resources, family actions and more! Click here to sign up for the daily Thirty Days of Love emails.

“Once Upon a Time” These simple words tell your mind to settle in for a story. Dim the lights, pass the popcorn, because a story is about to unfold.

We are storied people. We make meaning of our present moment by the way we frame it in context with a larger beginning, middle, and end. We find ourselves caught up in the rising action, experiencing the bliss of a climax, and seeing where our story goes from here.

This is precisely why sharing our stories is so important. We can’t know where we’re going if we don’t know where we’ve been. We are always shaped by story – the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we are told by others, the stories we find ourselves in. We are storied people living in a storied world.

At Middle Church we value story. Every month I sit down with a group of 20-30 year olds over brunch and facilitate space for us to share a part of our stories. And as story after story is told, I am always captured by the ways the similar stories from these different people overlap and collide. When we share our stories with one another we create space for a new story to emerge.

What We Remember

Stories are what we remember. Narrative learning theorist Jerome Bruner wrote, “If [you] don’t catch something in a narrative structure, it doesn’t get remembered very well, and it doesn’t seem to be accessible for further kinds of mulling over.” While the facts of life are important, it is the story of life that we remember. It is the story that shapes who we are and who we are becoming.

Sermons at Middle Church cover a range of styles. But while there are five different preachers on staff, there is one thing our preaching all has in common: story. We are intentional about listening to the stories of our community and the stories of our world, re-telling them so that we discover hope in the midst of despair, peace in the midst of violence, and love in the midst of violence. We want our community to see their stories as a part of the larger story of our world. Because it is this cacophony of stories that is the story of God.

What We Do

Stories are more than just what we tell or what we remember. Stories are what we do. We don’t just anticipate them in the future but we bring them to life in the present. We work every day for love and justice and grace and peace, knowing that our present actions affect the story before us.

Because this story is not waiting to be told. It is waiting to be lived, brought to life in whatever here and now you find yourself in.

So what are you waiting for? Bring your “once upon a time” to life right now.

Today is Day 13 of the Thirty Days of Love. Today’s action is to learn more about domestic workers and immigration reform through the We Belong Together coalition. Click here for resources and ways to take action to help pass compassionate immigration reform this year! Click here for resources, family actions, and more! Click here to sign up for the daily Thirty Days of Love emails.

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My name is Maria Huerta. I am the proud mother of four children and an immigrant who arrived in this country 17 years ago. I’m also a National Organizer at the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA.) Together with domestic workers and diverse allies around the country, we are fighting for immigration reform that will be inclusive and fair for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country, and especially for immigrant women domestic workers.

For ten years, I was a domestic worker, cleaning housing and caring for children and adults. In my last job as a caregiver, I was hired to take care of my elderly neighbor. For the first few months, I took care of her for 12 hours a day, six days a week. I helped her with her personal care, cooked for her, and cleaned the house. For this work, I earned $1,000 per month. After five months, her two daughters arrived to live with her. I was then expected to care for her 24 hours a day, and also to tend to the needs of her daughters. Although there was an extra bedroom, once her daughters arrived I was forced to sleep in an old armchair in the living room. I wasn’t allowed to take breaks or go visit my family, who lived next door. I was rarely able to sleep through the night, since I would have to check on the woman I cared for. My workload had doubled, but my salary had not. I was still earning $1,000 per month, which amounted to less than two dollars per hour. As an immigrant woman, I thought I had no rights, and thought that I had no chance of speaking out about my situation.

My story is not unique. As an organizer, I hear stories on a daily basis of immigrant women domestic workers who have been discriminated against and abused as a result of their immigration status. More than three quarters of all domestic workers in this country are immigrants, and half of that number are undocumented. For over 75 years, domestic workers have been excluded from some of the country’s most basic labor protections. As domestic workers, we work in the shadows, and undocumented workers are doubly hidden. We continue to live in a society where our work isn’t valued or recognized as labor that is as important as any other, but we know our work is valuable. The work of immigrant women makes possible all of the other work in this country. We care for the things that are most precious to our employers: their homes, children and loved ones. We make it possible for our employers to achieve their own personal and professional goals, and our work is essential but rarely recognized.

Though women and children make up ¾ of all immigrants to this country, immigration laws have traditionally excluded us and made us vulnerable. While immigrant women make the homes, schools, communities and economy of this country stronger, we still are often afraid to speak up about violence and exercise our rights and our children live with the fear that they will lose a parent to deportation. For millions of immigrant women workers, the need for comprehensive immigration reform is urgent. We need to be able to live without fear, keep our families together, and work with dignity and respect.

The abuse that I faced as an immigrant domestic worker gave me strength and desire to fight for changes on behalf of my community. As National Organizer with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, I now have the opportunity to work with domestic workers, immigrant women and women from all walks of life for changes that will benefit us all. Our We Belong Together campaign is showing that immigration is a women’s issue, and that women’s groups, faith groups and immigrant rights organizations working together can tip the balance in favor of immigration policies that will be fair and inclusive for all, especially women and children.

This country is our home, and is the place that we contribute to in countless ways every day. We are fighting so that the contributions of domestic workers and millions of other immigrants will be seen and valued. We invite you to join us, and together we will make our communities and this country stronger than ever.

Today is Day 12 of the Thirty Days of Love. Today’s daily action is to ask yourself: How do I identify myself in terms of ability, race and/or ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender identity and expression? Spend some time journaling or drawing about how your identities influence how you see the world and the world sees you. Click here for resources, family actions, and more! Click here to sign up for the daily Thirty Days of Love emails.

Driving home on Sunday afternoon, I heard Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom of California on the radio say that 75% of new kindergarten students in California are non-white. I’ll be honest, that number shocked me. I knew demographics were changing but 75% of all new kindergarten students in the whole state? I was sure I heard him wrong. When I arrived home, I looked it up. What I found is that I had, in fact, misheard him. The actual number is 76%!

That statistic, more than anything I’ve heard recently about changing demographics, sunk in. As a white person, unless I develop my ability to step outside my cultural understandings and experience, I will find myself in narrower and narrower circles. I’ve known that’s been important for a long time now; that’s why I’ve made my own intercultural competence a personal/professional goal and a part of my ongoing spiritual practice.

We all have work to do in extending our circles of intercultural competence. If you’re a white American Unitarian Universalist, like I am, maybe it’s becoming more familiar with Egyptian Muslim immigrants. If you’re a black, heterosexual woman, perhaps it’s learning about the experience of transgender people. If you’re able-bodied, maybe it’s coming to understand the life of someone who’s deaf or navigates in a wheelchair.

As individuals become more interculturally competent, so must our faith communities. Not only because monoculture faith communities will become irrelevant, but because, as people committed to ending oppression, we have a moral obligation to continually widen our circles of love.

That’s why the Multicultural Growth and Witness team at the UUA began the Multicultural Ministries Sharing Project in 2013. Its purpose is to learn from people who have historically marginalized identities/experiences around ability, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, race, and/or ethnicity and ask them to reflect on their experiences, their needs, and their vision for the future of Unitarian Universalism.

I’m thrilled to announce that 1,500 people responded to our survey between July 1 and November 31, 2013. We couldn’t have asked for better geographic distribution of the respondents. They are almost equally divided among census regions: 23% from the Midwest, 23% from the Northeast, 27% from the West and 27% from the South.

We are currently in the process of analyzing the results and figuring out what the data tell us. We’ve learned, for example, that people choose many ways to identify in terms of sexual orientation. We asked people to “select the identity(ies) that you apply to yourself in terms of sexual orientation.” When the respondents answered, they didn’t just choose the commonly referred to identities of straight or gay. People also responded in significant numbers to lesbian, bisexual, queer, pansexual, homosexual, asexual, and same-gender loving. Of those who identified as straight, many also claimed a heterosexual identity; a significant number indicated they preferred the term heterosexual to straight.

These data, among others in the survey, will help us develop new relevant curriculum and resources to support the Welcoming Congregation program. Other data and text responses will provide valuable insights into how we need to adapt our congregations to a changing demographic. I do hope for great outcomes from the survey. I know, too, that this is an exciting time for us to embrace the changing demographics with intention, faith, and love. Stay tuned. We’ll be releasing data through www.StandingontheSideofLove.org as it becomes available, with a final report due out by the UUA’s General Assembly in Providence, RI this coming June.

Today is Day 11 of the Thirty Days of Love. Today’s action is to learn more about The Sanctuaries, and engage not only in our own lives, but also in the lives of others. Click here for resources, family actions, and more! Click here to sign up for the daily Thirty Days of Love emails.

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We spend a lot of time talking about social outreach. What about social inreach?

I can still remember: it had been a grueling day monitoring elections. As the sun set and the polls closed, we hopped in a cab and sped off to the local bar. Within a couple of hours, most of the team was letting loose and living it up. Some folks were dancing on tables, others tripping over each other as they shouted pop songs at the top of their lungs. We stayed until the early morning, rode home, and pulled ourselves out of bed three hours later to stumble our way back to work.

Our team would later decide whether democracy had “worked” in this fledgling developing country.

For a long time, I assumed social justice was something that happened “out there.” Taking down big mean corporations. Protesting exploitative governmental organizations. Without a doubt, some of that still needs to happen. But there’s another side to the story that we often choose to ignore: institutions are only as humane as the people behind them.

How can we work to give others a good life if we aren’t living one ourselves?

And I’m not just talking about partying. Prestige and profits, popularity and pop culture, there are many things that prove equally as addictive. Social justice isn’t just something we do; it’s something we are. It’s not just “out there,” but “in here” as well. The way we live our lives also matters.

I’m part of a generation that’s often chided for being narcissistic. For whatever reason, it’s become acceptable, even fashionable, to dismiss millennials as being self-absorbed. But that label doesn’t square with my everyday experience. I’m not disputing the fact that younger people can become quite self-centered, myself included, just like human beings of any age. What I more often witness, though, is something quite different: a yearning for self-empowerment. A desire to take responsibility for one’s life. In the words of KRS-One, a commitment to raising one’s “self-worth, self-esteem and self-respect.”

If social justice is something that’s lived, it is about you. It’s absolutely personal. But that doesn’t mean you should only focus on yourself. In fact, I’ve found that windows often make the best mirrors. Try looking into someone else’s life and you’ll see things about yourself you never noticed.

That’s why Osa Obaseki and I started a new bi-weekly podcast called Soulidarity. Each episode, we invite guests of diverse racial and religious backgrounds to reflect on the most important questions of our lives. We’re convinced that every person’s story holds a profound spiritual truth about the world we share, and that when we take the time to exchange stories, we’re not just entertained but also empowered. We witness justice incarnate.

In the end, that invitation to grow in and through another person’s story is what social inreach is all about. Perhaps one of the best ways to discover what to do with our lives is by engaging the lives of others.